Tag: writing

A Surfeit of Good Advice

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 4 Comments

Aspiring and neophyte writers are always looking for advice (though sometimes, I suspect, it’s not so much advice that they’re looking for as company in their struggles, and a sign that somebody out there takes them seriously), and lots of people are happy to give it to them.

People tell them, “Avoid adverbs.”

People tell them, “Don’t use the passive voice.”

People tell them, “Make your prose lean and economical; eschew elegant writing and special effects.”

So they weed out adverbs assiduously from their final drafts, and turn every possible passive sentence into an active one, and put their prose on a fitness regimen guaranteed to take it down to zero per cent body fat.  All of this is hard work, and they are proud of it when they’re done.

And usually, their prose is the better for it, because they were, after all, neophyte writers, and stood to learn a lot from that much intense concentration on their texts.

But then they start hanging out with more rarefied givers of advice, who speak disparagingly of the elimination of nuance by the compulsive eradication of adverbs, and who point out that sometimes the passive voice is just what’s needed to convey the relationship between the subject of the sentence and the action of the verb, and who wax eloquent in their appreciation of leisurely, expansive prose.

And the neophyte writers bury their heads in their manuscripts and weep.   Will nobody, they say, will nobody tell them which side is right?

Alas, no.  Becoming a writer means learning to live with uncertainty.  All I can offer are some general guidelines:  don’t use too many adverbs; don’t overuse the passive voice; and try not to use more words than you need for whatever it is that you want to try.  But don’t stop trying.  It’s better to attempt something new and not have it work right the first time than it is to never try anything new at all.

We didn’t become writers because we were risk-averse.

It All Counts for Research, Right?

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Today’s entry in the “everything is grist for the writer’s mill” department:  a decidedly NSFW illustrated article on a 1680 sex manual that even shocked Samuel Pepys.  (But he read it anyway, the horndog.)

For the prurient or dedicated researcher — not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive — the article includes a link to the full version of the text as digitized on Google Books.  Because you never can tell what you might need to know someday.

Lights, Camera, Action

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 4 Comments

Readers like to see your characters in motion.  Even a story focused on an interior dilemma can be made more gripping if the problem has some physical action to mirror it or contrast with it.  As for stories focused on exterior problems, they’re like sharks — they can either keep moving or die.

Some writers have the storyteller’s version of kinesthetic awareness.  They’re able to keep the complicated three-dimensional moving geometry of a multiple-character action scene running in their heads without having to work at it.  When they need to describe what Character A is doing and exactly how that character occupies space and moves through the room in relationship to Characters B, C, and D, the only thing they need to do is check their mental diagram and it’s all there.

The rest of us have to work at it.

Diagrams on graph paper are one way to do it, and so is moving counters or figurines around on a tabletop.

Example:  For a scene involving an infant, a nanny, a bodyguard, and a wicked kidnapper sneaking in through the balcony, break out a chess set.  Pick out one of the queens to represent the nanny, one of the knights to represent the bodyguard, a rook for the wicked kidnapper, and a pawn for the baby in its crib.  Designate one side of the chessboard as the balcony.  Designate a square on the appropriate side of the chessboard in relation to the balcony as the door.  Put the pawn in the right position for the baby’s crib.  Then put your knight/bodyguard, your queen/nanny and your wicked kidnapping rook in their appropriate places — off the board next to the designated door square, on a square next to the baby pawn, off the board next to the balcony.  Then start moving the pieces to block out the action, and watch how things happen.

(Amusingly enough, writers of romance and erotica can have similar problems, although with a different sort of action.  They have to keep careful track of whose arms and legs are going where, and make certain that nobody ends up in a physically impossible position, or one that’s going to give them muscle cramps if they stay that way for very long.  I’ve heard of poseable artist’s dummies being used to work things out, and have also heard of writers who’ve enlisted the aid of a sympathetic partner for the more athletic bits.)

On Writing Forsoothly

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 9 Comments

“Writing forsoothly” is the term we like to use around the house for all the different varieties of bad pseudo-archaic diction that infest modern fantasy — historical and created-world fantasy in particular.  J. R. R. Tolkien is undoubtedly to blame for a lot of it, because his characters do like their elevated language; what unobservant readers miss is the way that Tolkien modulates his characters’ dialogue, moving effortlessly from plain vernacular to almost-archaic high formal speech and back again, depending upon the situation and the company.  Strider the Ranger has a much commoner way of talking than Aragorn the Heir to the Throne of Gondor, but at the same time they’re both recognizably the same guy.

It’s probably unwise to play with writing in extreme forsoothly unless you can at least approach Tolkien’s level of skill and language-awareness.  It’s a lot harder to do than it looks, and the failure mode is dire.  But if you’re determined to give it a try — and nobody ever makes any progress in this game unless they regularly try things that they aren’t certain will work — there are a few things it will help to do first.

One:  Ask yourself, “Is this really the direction my writing talent lies in?” and answer it honestly.  If your interior Magic 8-Ball refuses to yield up anything more specific than “reply hazy; ask again later,” find a kind but honest friend and ask them.  Kind, because you don’t want your self-image pulled down and stomped upon with hobnailed boots; and honest, because you’re not asking them for sympathy, you’re asking them for the truth.

Two:  Prepare yourself.  Read genuine period or formal writing until it dribbles out of your ears.  If you start talking in Shakespearean or Regency English at the breakfast table, you’re probably ready.  And a good thing, too, because at that point your friends and family are either bored stiff with your project, or convinced that you’re going nuts.

Three: Stop researching and write.  Don’t worry about getting all the nuances down perfectly; you can always polish the heck out of the language in your second — or third or fourth or fifth — draft.

Four:  Go find that kind but honest friend again.  This time, ask them if the archaic or formal language in fact worked; and ask them, also, whether they think you got it right but took it too far.  As with so many other things in writing, a light hand is best.

(For an interesting example of archaic diction done well in an unexpected venue, check out the historical romance For My Lady’s Heart, by Laura Kinsale, now available again in e-book format after a long while out of print.)

Writing Weather. (Not.)

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

We’re in the midst of a spell of heat and humidity that makes doing anything, even writing,  seem dreary and unattractive.

Also, there are mosquitoes.

Midsummer in general has never been my favorite time for writing, despite the fact that more than once I’ve found myself head down and running for deadline daylight in the midst of the hot and sticky season.  The dead of winter — that stretch from mid-January to mid-February when this part of the word gets hit with temperatures in the subzero-Fahrenheit range — isn’t much better.  It’s hard to concentrate when your mind keeps drifting off-topic to the question of the winter electric bill.

The best seasons for writing, as far as I’m concerned, are spring, fall, late summer, and early winter.  The temperatures are moderate (for local values of moderate); the weather is mostly well-behaved; and the local insect life is at worst only moderately annoying.

Summer, though . . . ugh.  But I suppose it could be worse.  I could always be trying to write through summer in Texas.  Or any season in the tropics.

There’s a reason I wound up living — and writing —  in far northern New Hampshire.

Tech Notes

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 4 Comments

I’ve written before about the issue of buried or implied technology in language.

But there’s another technology-related question that writers–especially writers of created-world fantasy– need to be aware of:  What is the general tech level of your story?

A lot of created-world fantasy takes place in a pre-industrial setting.  (Steampunk is perhaps the most obvious exception, but only if you consider steampunk to be a species of fantasy rather than a species of science fiction — a question upon which opinion is divided.)  “Pre-industrial”, though, covers a lot of ground.  Do you mean pre-gunpowder?  Pre-clockwork?  Pre-mass production and interchangeable parts?  Does your society have steam engines or water wheels?  Spinning wheels or drop spindles?  Is your hero’s sword steel or bronze?  Is his armor plate or chain or boiled leather?  Does he pay the swordsmith in barter or with coin?  Does his banker know about letters of credit and double-entry book-keeping?  Has banking even been invented yet?

You need to think about all of these things if you’re not going to have your story taking place in an ersatz-medieval RennFaire fantasyland — and you need to make certain that your tech levels match across the board.

(Yes.  This means that you have to do research if you’re going to write fantasy.  Books like The Timelines of History and television programs like the old BBC Connections series are a good place to start.)

Random Thoughts on Point of View

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

Point of view is a tricky thing to get right, and it takes a lot of practice.  As a general rule, you should be inside only one character’s head per scene, and you should make it crystal clear to the reader which character that is.  While you’re inside that character’s head, only what he or she can directly observe should get reported to the reader (therefore, no seeing what’s around corners that your character can’t poke his or her head around.)  Also, any commentary on the action should be filtered through the viewpoint character’s perceptions and attitude.

***

First person, and single-viewpoint tight third person, are good points of view to use when part of the impact of your story depends upon keeping some plot elements secret from both your POV character and the reader until the time is ripe for them to be revealed.  Try to avoid writing yourself into plot situations where your first person narrator knows something that the reader doesn’t; it’s a tour de force if you can pull it off, but the failure mode isn’t pretty, and even a successful attempt is going to leave a certain number of resentful readers in its  wake.

***

True omniscient point of view is fiendishly difficult to do well, and it’s a good idea to master multiple-viewpoint third-person first.  The longer the novel, and the more ground it covers, the more point of view characters you may need — but when in doubt, err on the side of parsimony.

Getting There

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Fantastic and historical fiction is full of journeys, quests, hot pursuits, and other assorted road trips — sometimes with magical assistance, and sometimes not.

It’s with the “not” that things can get difficult, because a lot of modern-day writers don’t have anything like a working knowledge of any kind of travel that doesn’t involve an internal combustion engine and a four-lane divided highway.  Doing research can be tricky, too, because while modern-day horse people (and trail hikers and dogsled racers and people who raise and train yokes of oxen for fun) are almost always delighted to share their specialized knowledge, a lot of the time it can be like asking a NASCAR driver or a rally enthusiast, “How many days would it take me to drive from Podunk to Ashtabula?”

You’ll get an answer, all right, but it may well be so full of qualifying details that you can’t sort out the single thing you really need to know, or so far out there on the extreme performance end that an ordinary mortal wouldn’t have a chance of coming near it.  These people are all highly-qualified experts driving perfectly-maintained, high-end machines, and all you really want to know is roughly how long it would take an ordinary Joe or Jane driving a plain vanilla sedan with an automatic transmission and 50,000 miles on the odometer.

(I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that once horses stopped being a means of transportation and became a hobby, the equine equivalent of the midrange family car with automatic transmission and cruise control started fading out of the picture.)

Nevertheless, you have to try.  Criticism of fantasy, both from within and from without the genre, has already said a lot of true and cutting things about fantasy horses that are functionally indistinguishable from motorcycles; you don’t want to provide the critics with yet more ammunition.

For some help on that, you could do worse than to read this LiveJournal post, here — also the comments, which contain much additional useful information.

It’s All in the Timing

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

We had breakfast for dinner tonight.

To be more precise, we had buttermilk pancakes, maple syrup, bacon, and scrapple for dinner tonight, and our established grammar and syntax of dining say that this is breakfast, even if eaten at 8 PM.  And a meal that would be eminently satisfactory in its accustomed time slot becomes something even better — unexpected and even a little bit subversive — when consumed at a time of day normally reserved for roast meats and steamed vegetables, for soups and stir-fries and casseroles.

The same principle holds for writing.  Put a character into a setting that’s out of sync with his or her normal environment, and you add interest.  Move an event out of its traditional or expected place in the storyline, and you generate suspense — if the author has played fast and loose with one set of expectations, all of the others are fair games as well, and anything can happen.

It’s not always necessary to invent new things.  A lot of the time, you can do just as well simply by putting familiar things in unexpected places.